This week, IDEMS International has started working with the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, part of CGIAR, to support the analysis of Tricot data through R-Instat. The work forms part of a wider initiative supported by the Gates Foundation through CGIAR, bringing together expertise in participatory agricultural research and statistical software development.
Tricot is an approach to agricultural research in which farmers test and compare different crop varieties under their own local growing conditions. By bringing together results from many farmers, researchers can better understand how varieties perform across different environments. However, analysing these data requires specialised statistical methods, which can be a barrier to their wider use.
Our work focuses on integrating Tricot analysis methods into R-Instat, making them accessible through a user-friendly interface without requiring researchers or practitioners to write R code. Alongside the software development, we will be working on training materials and practical examples to support people in applying these methods to their own data.
The collaboration also provides an opportunity to build on our wider work developing statistical tools that can be shared, adapted, and used across different contexts, while supporting researchers and practitioners to work directly with locally collected agricultural data.
Looking ahead, we anticipate this initiative will have the opportunity to draw from the lessons we’ve learned from Farmer Federations about the value of local data ownership and analysis, and in return add to the range of open tools available to such Federations, unions, and local cooperatives.